From apples to waste – This year, ten ATB doctoral researchers have successfully graduated. With their work covering all five ATB programme areas, the range of topics is broad. We warmly congratulate them on their graduation and wish them all the best for their future careers.
In February 2024, our colleague Lena Dißmann defended her dissertation on "Recording methods of respiratory parameters in cattle" at the Free University of Berlin in the Department of Veterinary Medicine very successfully and with great conviction after only 2.5 years. We are delighted with her very impressive achievement and wish her every success for her future career, which she is currently continuing at ATB.
In March 2024, Zhou Zoe Yang joined her colleague and completed her dissertation at Massey University in New Zealand. With her research on kiwifruit, she dealt with non-invasive post-harvest techniques on the topic "Laser Backscattering Imaging for sorting of kiwifruit considering various storage disorders". Congratulations to her! We wish you all the best and continued success.
In May 2024, two ATB scientists successfully defended their dissertations. On the one hand, veterinarian Julio Elias Hilgert researched the topic "Assessment of the influencing factors regarding methane potential due to manure storage in dairy cow and fattening pig farms" as part of the EraNet project "M4Models". He completed his work at the Free University of Berlin.
On the other hand, Christian Dittrich successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Twin-Screw Extruded Lignocellulosic Plant Residues: Experimental Study of Physical Properties of Fibre and Fibre Products" at the Technical University of Berlin. His work at ATB focused on the production of fibres in the extruder and their further processing into pellets.
We wish them both all the best for their future professional and personal development!
After a short summer break, Akshay D. Sonawane graduated in August 2024., also at the Technical University of Berlin, on the topic of "Ethylene Dynamics in Fresh Produce Packaging: A Comprehensive Modelling Approach". In just three years, the DAAD student not only completed his research work, but also six scientific publications. Congratulations to him! We wish Akshay continued success and are delighted that he will remain with the ATB as a postdoctoral researcher in the Fruity-Twin project.
Three researchers successfully completed their theses at the end of the year. Nicolás Tapia Zapata defended his doctoral thesis in food technology on "Mathematical modelling of airflow during precooling operations" at Massey University, New Zealand, in November 2024. He is now working at ATB on the EU project CrackSense, in which he is investigating the influence of microclimate on yield in fruit production. We congratulate him on his success and look forward to continuing our collaboration!
Zhengqiu Ding successfully defended his doctoral thesis at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin just one day later. With his dissertation entitled "Biomass Valorisation Strategies for Circular Bioeconomy Transition: Dynamics and Complexities across Multi-levels", he was able to show how multi-system and multi-level interactions can influence innovations in socio-technical systems. The results of his doctoral thesis have been published in several peer-reviewed journals. We wish him all the best for his future research activities!
The trio is completed by Marina Pasteris. At the end of November, she successfully completed her interdisciplinary dissertation entitled "Anaerobic dige stion of sorghum silage: link between feedstock, reactor system and microbial community" at the Technical University of Berlin. We also wish her all the best for her professional and personal future.
In addition, Marios Psarianos and Richard Orozco successfully completed their dissertations in January 2024. Read more about this in our news from February 2024.
We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate our employee Lennart Trösken on his successful dissertation on the topic of "Simulation of processes on farms to evaluate machine deployment". He completed his thesis at the Institute for Mobile Machines and Commercial Vehicles at TU Braunschweig in March 2024 with "summa cum laude" (with distinction). We are very pleased that he is researching methods and mechanical solutions for herbicide-free weed control in the SensoBA project at ATB.
We would also like to thank all the supervisors who supported our doctoral students with advice and assistance.